Titanium nitride (TiN), titanium diboride (TiB2) and titanium carbide (TiC) and the like have high hardness, high abrasion resistance, good high-temperature oxidation resistance, etc., and thus they are often used as cutter materials and abrasion-resistant components and the like. To further improve hardness and abrasion resistance of TiN, TiB2 and TiC and the like to meet the high-speed cutting requirements, some researchers adopted materials such as cubic boron nitride to serve as an added phase to prepare the composite material. In about 1950's, artificial diamond micro-powder and artificial cubic boron nitride (cBN) micro-powder were sintered into polycrystalline blocks large in size to serve as cutter materials in the USA, the South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Japan, etc. At the beginning of 1970's, composite sheets of cBN and hard alloy were provided, and the composite sheets were formed by sintering or pressing a layer of PCD or PcBN which was 0.5-1 mm thick on hard alloy base matrix, so that the problems that a superhard cutter material is low in bending strength and has welding-on difficulty are solved, and the application of superhard cutters enters into a practical stage. In 1980, Wentorf et al in the GE Corporation reported their results in the aspects of diamond and cBN material sintering (Science, 208(1980)873-880), that is, the dense diamond-cBN material was prepared by adopting the ultrahigh pressure conditions. In January 2013, Professor Tian Yong-jun in Yanshan University published an academic paper (Nature, 493 (2013) 385-388) on Nature and further used boron nitride particles with similar onion structures to prepare nanoscale cubic boron nitride with the hardness exceeding diamond, and the cubic boron nitride has become the hardest substance in the world. At present, the cBN cutter material is prepared substantially by sintering cBN micro-powder and bonding agents (such as Co, Al, Ti and TiN) at 1300-1900° C. under the pressure of 4-8 GPa; the cost is high, the yield is low, and the product shape and size are limited. Moreover, cBN cutters are also subject to some limitation in use. For example, the cBN cutters are high in brittleness, poor in intensity and toughness and not suitable for intermittent surface processing under impact load. It becomes a hot issue people are concerned about recently how to use cBN to serve as a hard phase to improve hardness and toughness and the like of other cutter materials. Due to the introduction of a superhard cBN phase, not only can the hardness and abrasion resistance of a TiN-TiB2 composite material be improved remarkably, but also the superhard cBN serves as superhard particles in the composite material to result in crack deflection, and accordingly the toughness of the material can be further improved.
At present, in order to prepare a composite material containing a cBN phase, materials are mixed by dry mixing or ball milling methods mostly, and then undergo pressure sintering. For example, Rong et al placed cBN powder, TiN powder and Al powder in an agate mortar to perform dry mixing for 1-2 h, and then performed high-pressure sintering (Diamond and Related Materials 11 (2002) 280-286). In their authorized patent (with the authorized notification number of CN101560624B), Zhang Rui et al mixed cubic boron nitride and bonding agents and then performed ball milling, and the ball milling time was 4-20 hours; after the ball milling, the powder was dried and sieved, undergoes cold press molding and was sintered to obtain a finished product. It is difficult to achieve uniform dispersion between all phases. Besides, even if there are sintering auxiliaries, the sintering temperature is high, which easily causes the cBN phase to be converted towards hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) serves as a soft phase, with a crystal structure and hardness similar to those of graphite, and accordingly the phase change from cBN to hBN causes reduction of material hardness and deterioration of cutting performance. In addition, the volume change resulting from phase change may cause the reduction of material density, and may also cause the reduction of the abrasion resistance of the cutter material. As a result, the service life of the cutter is further shortened. Yoshida et al from Japan (Journal of Materials Research, 1997, 12(3), pp 585-588) adopted a molten salt method to coat cBN with a TiN-TiB2 coating and then obtained a titanium nitride-titanium diboride-cubic boron nitride (TiN-TiB2-cBN) composite material by performing sintering for 30 min under the pressure of 5.5 GPa at about 1450° C. However, this method is time consuming and complex, and molten salt has high toxicity against experimenters.